


Harvester of Hearts

by brittlelimbs



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: 2016 Reylux Tropesgiving Exchange, ? - Freeform, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Sex, Double Penetration, Drugged Sex, Dubious Consent, F/M, Isolation, Kidnapping, M/M, Masturbation, Pining, Rape/Non-con Elements, Sex, Sex Pollen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-03
Updated: 2016-12-03
Packaged: 2018-09-06 04:36:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8735110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brittlelimbs/pseuds/brittlelimbs
Summary: General Hux has been marooned on this planet for months and he's losing his mind. Kylo takes advantage. Sex pollen fill for the Reylux Tropesgiving Exchange.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nerdherderette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerdherderette/gifts).



> My fill for the Tropesgiving for the trope sex pollen! @nerdherderette, i'm so so sorry for any errors and typos-- this is what I get for procrastinating lol. Hope this gets at what you want, for all its incoherence!
> 
> title taken from a song of the same name by my boy Rufus Wainwright

Pup tent. This is a rough demarcation of where General Hux exists, where he _is_ , both in person and in spirit. If disheartenment has a color, it would be grey; if defeat has has a dimension, it seven feet by seven feet by seven feet, nearly as high as Hux is tall, give or take a little more or less. Roof geometric and faceted like the compound eye of an insect. Made of some light polymer-plastic, something with durability to it, built shock-troop sturdy and boring enough to live in perfectly for months on end. His room— _cell_ , on the bad days— is Spartan. There’s an old, early-gen transmitter outfitted on the modest dresser that's become a kind companion; he likes to stroke its smooth console, fiddle and palm, and in the dirge of fifth week he discovered if you hit it just right, _bang_ on the top, you can get _music_. Or, at least, he’s been finessing noise out of it, of some sort; sometimes it sounds like he might have the wrong apparatus to grapple the melody with, entirely, and sometimes it’s just static. But, on occasion, there’s taste swirling around in the murk of backwater radio-space, and he’ll get a really nice waltz.

Those days are the good ones.

The fat bug climbing on the frame of his bunk click-skitters away as he waves a drowsy hand, then hums, then settles onto his back. The nights here on this planet are quite long. Even over the course of months, his biorhythms have stubbornly refused to adjust. He blames his father for this; it feels like comeuppance of a genetic, miserly sort. He flicks his eyes half-shut and watches a spider, skin-crawlingly crimson, lay its eggs in the darkness above his feet, writhing in the chinks of light cast across from the lamps outside as it spins a string of children from its swollen abdomen.

Wriggling in the muck of his Order’s collapse has given Hux a new take. Stripped: empty chevrons on his sleeve that signify nothing, pull no rank of any kind, save for over the handful of men he has stationed here with him on reserve. Running things on a skeleton crew, the remainders of his inheritance burning burning burning in the center of a white-hot star, forever. He wonders if, one day, he’ll see them, feel their heat—his troopers, and the halogen-glow of what were their bones, once, now light.

 

He breathes heavily through pursed lips and tucks a strand of too-long hair behind his ear as the leaves shake their calico-dance on the ceiling above. He sucks at the callous of wet skin he’s built on the inside of his mouth, worrying the nub gently between his teeth. One bad habit boredom’s accrued. He’s started on the cuticles of his thumbs, too, chewing and scrapping. Brendol would be appalled. He keeps his gloves on when he speaks to his officers, now, as rare as their meetings are; he sees them so infrequently that he’s started to name them by quirks.

 _Lieutenant, the gimpy who one licks their lips before they speak, who stutters sometimes and sweats too much (they all sweat too much):_ _Still silent, sir. No communication from Leader. Quiet on all channels._

_Hux, the rangy one who hasn’t shaved recently and probably smells a little suspect: Yes, right, understood, good, okay._

 

_Okay._

 

Stasis.

 

Hux hums. Maybe that’s a way of explaining how things could shake down and out so strange. Hux has kissed Kylo Ren no less than three times in as many days, and maybe he can owe this, in some part, to the way time has stopped.

He tosses onto his side. The bugs are loud to deafening.  
Or maybe it’s something in the strange, purple sky, he ponders. A chemical in the hot, slogging humidity that sits in the atmosphere like death that’s making them cross wires like this. The insects, perhaps, bites laced with dopamine and tiny, translucent wings beating the thick, loving air to a froth for Hux and Ren to drink down.

Hux slaps the itch on his neck and there’s a tiny crunch beneath his palm.

He’s no entomologist.

This Kylo is one he’d like to keep, if he could. The strange liminal beast that’s started taking bedside vigils in his tent, softer-looking, somehow, in the bluedark. He’s become Hux’s keeper, his midnight visitor, clad in nothing but plain fatigues and too-small undershirts (so worn-soft under Hux’s fingers, that sometimes, when he’s bunching the cotton over Kylo’s head, he’s worried they’ll split), looking nothing but raw. It started during the sixth week and hasn’t stopped since; there’s a narrow difference between fucking a man and kissing him on the mouth, and Hux trod it so recklessly that he overstepped, plunged.

Kylo Ren tastes bitter and unpalatable and completely lovely. On the nights they’re together, Hux pretends like this is some sort of vacation. This isn’t entirely crazy. He has no desk, at least, and no duties save for to wander in the modest perimeter of space he’s allowed around the camp. Snoke’s pinned him, thorax, abdomen, segmented body, to the confines of a tiny hillock. The camp is sunken into the jungle of this hillock like a rotten molar, and each night, he dreams of running away from it. Each morning, he looks at his thin, pale arms in the grimy mirror above his hygiene kit, and makes no pretense at survival. There, again: stasis.

Kylo, meanwhile, has been going on pilgrimages. His words. He’s built a means of travel on his own, intuited a tiny speeder out of the junk they brought with them in hopes of—something. He ditches it under the gnarled hollow made by roots at the edge of their camp, and then leaves for days at a time; _temples_ , he grunts when probed, and little else. Some strange Force-rite, Hux thinks, though he can only guess. Right behind that, one thing he doesn’t have to guess, at all: he hates them. He hates them in all their abstractness, and doesn’t even realize why, fully, until one day when Ren leaves and Hux starts to deconstruct himself a little, just at the edges, because his absence has become a tangible miasma. The fingernail on the ring finger of his left hand goes missing, reasons unclear, and when they fuck that night, Hux bites Kylo on the neck hard enough to bleed. _Come back_ , it says, screaming in the vernacular of broken capillaries and crescent nail-kisses, Kylo’s soft groan at the ache. _Come back come home_.

They come, Hux, then Kylo, and in the space between their heaving breaths, Kylo asks what happened to his hand.

He keeps leaving. The bite fades. But for every one of the worst days, the very blackest and longest ones, there are the alright ones. Days where there is nothing to do but jack off or pray or sing. Days where Kylo is with him as they both sup on sweet fruits, nectar rolling down their wrists, skin white and protected from the afternoon rain by the wide leaves above. He knows how to shuck all the seeds, somehow, and Hux senses that this is one of his strange childhood competencies of which the two of them don’t commune. Ren keeps preparing the fruits, maskless and folded awkwardly on the stump outside the tent, and Hux keeps eating them. Occasionally, he’ll bring out the transmitter and they’ll hunt for a waltz. Usually there isn’t one. That’s alright; this is a pleasure planet they’re marooned on, he’s more certain of it with every passing week, and Hux sweats and sweats with excitement (he wore his stupid hat until month two when the sweatband got permanently stained dark, at point which, _fuck it_ ; he’ll build himself clean). Each one of these sweet days has layered up into a patina of—if it’s not goodness, then it’s something Hux has trouble identifying as anything else.

 

He moans and flips onto his belly. The chronometer on the floor next to the cot reads 3:45 and all he can think of is restlessness, hot and prickly, markedly different than the slow creep of humidity or the warmth of sunburn. Ren is gone tonight, and Hux aches for the new wonder of his kisses, more than that. It’s unnatural to become addicted to anything so quickly, but Hux exhaustedly chases his hit. He’s reminded of the sleepless nights of his lonely youth, then awkward puberty; he just wants sleep. He furtively repositions himself in his briefs, hefting his perking cock so it’ll all resettle smooth, go without a hitch, slide into the best, most base sort of self-medication he knows. The elastic of the waist snaps against his soft belly as he removes his hand, and then silence, save for the clicking of bugs and the soft, sinful squeaks of his cot as Hux begins to rut himself against it. He slips his fingers in his mouth, ring and pinky, as some poor facsimile of Kylo’s, imagining him force-feeding Hux the stickiness of the countless ripe fruits they've consumed together. Hux groans, made to lick them clean, all the way to the soft webbing at their root. The arousal courses through him like a wave and he rolls his hips harder to meet it. Then he’s on his back and popping his slick fingers from his mouth and sliding them down, down, beneath his balls and into himself as his other hand squeezes and kneads at his cock. He scissors out, finds himself still loose from the night before, and shivers.

It’s an odd feeling, deliciously so; he hasn’t done this for himself in _weeks_. Kylo doesn’t let him, never has, not even on that first night when he slipped into the tent while Hux was asleep and breathed hot on the back of his neck until they bent, broke. Hux gasping and Kylo grunting as he opened his general like a flower and fucked him on a cock so fat that Hux still, now, always, has to work to take it. The thing that hooked Hux so effortlessly, perhaps, has made him so sick with longing for Kylo in whatever sense he might have him. Hux fucks himself on his fingers, hard, helplessly comparing their thickness to Ren’s: thin, paltry, not-right, but good enough for this. He strokes the secret spot inside himself with his middle finger, lazy circles that make his cock jump and vision blur, press and bow his heels into the unforgiving cot. He crooks a knee up, bent, and imagines Kylo’s hand on his thighs, hooking them up to his chest for a proper fucking. Kylo, bullish and fevered, taking and taking; Hux presses down on his prostate once, twice, and comes; the thought of Kylo frenzied with his lust, with his obsession to have Hux and eat him whole, is appealing to the point of ecstasy.

 

He’s splayed out on his bunk, feebly gasping, spunk drying into a chafing irritation on his belly, and that’s precisely how Kylo finds him.

 

Hux thinks, immediately, of the stories of midshipmen. Men with the unfortunate occupation of living in space have a certain way of dealing; stories are one of them. Behemoths that feast on cold, proton cloud dust. Creatures living in the upper atmosphere of planetoids that make the thrusters go berserk, spell death. Sirens that haunt airlocks and linger around viewports, strange reflections of the mind’s eye that give men plenty reason to space themselves on purpose. Kylo seems to belong to that nebulous kind of mythology, something terrifying and magnetic in equal terms.

In short: Hux thinks he’s making him up.

“Kylo?” he probes, though he makes no move to clean or cover himself. If this is not real, he should only be ashamed of the strength of his desperation. If it is real, he hopes Kylo sees and grows jealous of Hux’s own two hands for wringing such visible pleasure from his body. But this is not real. His heart rate crawls and his chest rises with deep, measured breaths as he tapers off of his orgasm. Kylo would not come when plainly called; maybe he is dreaming.

Kylo simply grunts and begins to move hurriedly around the room. The light from the peeled-back flap of the tent makes his hair look dark and glossy as riverwater, and Hux realizes he’s taking things things and stuffing them in a knapsack. Hux’s things. Clothes, kit, _boots_ —

“Kylo!” Hux feels the dirt of the floor prickle under his socks as he rises from the cot, nearly swooning at the vertigo of it until he feels a strong grip at his naked bicep, holding him up. When the fuzzed-out static in his vision roars away, Kylo’s face looks concerned. It doesn’t suit him, Hux thinks, abstractly. “Are you alright?” Kylo asks. Half of his face is obscured in shadow and both eyes are glittering.

“The _fuck_ ,” Hux hisses, angry, but making no move to break Kylo’s too-tight hold. It feels better than it should. The come on his belly itches and he wishes, desperately, Kylo had been the one to put it there.

“She’s here,” he says, like it explains everything. _Who? What?_ Kylo’s bare hand suddenly burns where it touches him; his arm no longer feels like his own and the sound of his blood is deafening.

He might be shouting, he might be weeping; he isn’t sure because he can’t hear it over the loudness of this stupid fucking earth that has made something pitiable of him—

Kylo sweeps his hand.

 

 

There’s a pinch at his wrist. Hux squeezes his fists, open, closed, and consciousness lumbers in slowly after that. His eyes open easy, no drugs, but the disorientation, for a moment, is nauseating. He looks down at his body, sees that someone slipped him into fatigues and a shirt while he slept. Interesting. Then he looks beyond the plane of his hip and all at once he’s in the corner a space he has no recollection being, ever: old tech, shabby auxiliary cooling vents and stations, readouts encrusted with dust. The dust is everywhere, settled on every awkward, poorly designed facet of the interior, though there are scuffed tracks on the floor and dark, lumpy affects that Hux can’t decipher scattered about the room, suggesting recent inhabitance. The space is built so differently from his hardcoded Order layouts that it takes Hux a moment to recognize its purpose. A hold. One that clearly hasn’t seen space in cycles, decades, maybe longer, and is still grounded now: the planet outside filters in through the cool darkness of the ship’s maw, birdcalls and sunlight slipping past the cracked airlock at the aft. Some small part of him is disappointed at this, though this is nothing compared to the massive, if twisted, relief at no longer being somewhere that can be defined as _camp_ , _tent_ , or _Kylo_. A strand of humid breeze wafts up particulates of the dust and he coughs, moves to cover his mouth—can’t. There’s a glint; he’s chained at the wrist. His eyes follow the cuff along its chain to the fat strut of a support beam arching behind him. The links glitter and rattle as he limply shakes it, testing its durability out of principle.

It’s painfully evident that Kylo’s done this. If not by the monstrosity of the cuffing itself, then by the strange kindness of the food and water and sheepish bucket that have been placed beside him in easy reaching distance.

There’s even a standard-issue blanket tucked next to the rations, and Hux clucks softly at it, playing gently with his rough-hewn chain; he is a prisoner, but a somewhat comfortable one. He stuffs the blanket behind his back to cushion the curvature of the beam, spreads his legs. Then, in a practice he has well-honed over hours and hours and days and days and months upon months on this wretched fucking planet, he waits.

 

Kylo returns some time before dusk; there’s no chronometer around, at least that Hux can see, and he can only wager based upon the color and fortitude of the light tracking in through the tiny door-jamb slit of the hatch. He’s happy, at first, to hear Kylo’s boots crunching the foliage outside, as he’s eaten all the food and pissed in the bucket. Things might’ve gotten unsavory.

Then, as he pushes past the hatch: he’s carrying someone over his shoulders, looking like some dark saint of victory, their arms and legs of the body dangling down, the way you’d carry someone from a burning building. Tiny frame, ratted hair, dirty foot where its boot is missing, kitted out in some sort of plain, grey woolen thing that looks a little bit too warm for a climate like this one. Kylo grunts when he sees Hux is awake, but otherwise makes no move towards him. Instead, he throws aside the belt looped in one hand—Hux catches the sacred, silver glint of a lightsaber—before removing the body from his shoulders as gingerly as his hulking frame is able. The head of the person, the _girl_ , now, lolls back as Kylo unloops her arm from about his neck and lowers her to the dusty ground. He looks almost apologetic at this, as if he wishes he could lay her somewhere more comfortable. She moans, quietly, as Kylo towers over her, braced up on his knees, and it takes Hux a second to recognize Rey the Scavanger; he’s only seen little clips of her on security footage, caught the tail end of a _rumor_ of her, but there’s something entirely off-putting about seeing her without her tan-taught muscles spooled for a fight, or blood pinkening her teeth. An animal, she is; comes with the description.

There she is in all her infamy, laying there, completely limp beneath Kylo, and something about this is deeply disturbing.

 

Kylo comes over, says nothing, picks up the bucket and peers inside. Hux half-expects him to slosh the contents around a bit, the way he’s looking at it, but he doesn’t, just goes outside and empties it.

The base of the bucket makes an echo-y _pong_ when Kylo sets it down again. “Thank you,” Hux chirps, squaring his shoulders. “Now. Could you explain to me what’s going on.” He jangles his cuff enticingly, trying to seduce an answer out of Kylo with the appealing sound of his own entrapment. He’s less angry than he should be, really, less scared. Something about this is just two degrees separated from the tent, anyways, kissing-cousins with his miserable months at the camp (some small, sick inkling in him thinks: no, this is different, this is _better_ ), but he can’t just sit there with his thumb up his ass. You can’t just do that, when you’re chained up. Normal people ask questions.

He asks again. _What’s happening_. Kylo doesn’t answer him, heading back to the airlock. For a moment, the space is empty and silent, save for the soft wheeze of the girl’s labored breathing. Her head tips to the side, brow furrowed like a child in the clutches of a restless dream, and for a moment, Hux can see the thing the desert took. Then Kylo noisily returns, bushel of fruit tucked under one arm, and the airlock closes behind him with a hiss. Suddenly, the room feels more claustrophobic, a hermitically sealed womb occupied by a wounded jedi and a mad sith and Hux—whatever it is he considers himself, now. Mad, also. Expat.

Kylo selects a fruit from the basket, offering it to Hux like a thin-skinned, pewter-grey peace offering. Up close, he can see that Ren is only half a man, worn to a specter of himself on exhaustion, and that the last two fingers on his left hand are missing where they should be clutched around the fruit, cauterized stumps blisterpink and shining. How utterly revolting. Hux wonders what they feel like to the touch.

He’ll try again: “Was it worth it?” Kylo blinks. “Your fingers. Was it a worthy duel?”

Kylo stares at him for a moment. Hux can see the red rim around his watering eyes.

“If you run, you’ll find nothing,” he says simply. “This ship is in the darkest jungle, and there are no comms.”

 

Hux nods. “Of course.”

 

_Yes, right, understood, good, okay._

Kylo picks up Rey like a doll in his arms and takes her somewhere. Hux eats the fruit.

 

The next few days pass in a smear that pitches strange and queasy around Hux, tugging him easily from boredom to arousal to terror. Some time during the second day, after a few soft reassurances ( _no, I won’t run; there’s nowhere to go, I’ll be good)_ Hux is unchained, and he takes to drowsily wandering around their little territory, little else to do, anyways. He misses his radio.

From the outside, the ship is a squat, ancient thing, all green and grown over by the planet’s sheer aggressiveness, and Kylo’s right: there are no comms. Nothing visible for miles and miles around, either, save for the valley they’re surrounded by on all sides, edges scooped-up wide by formative ballistic explosions and carpeted with dense jungle. Hux marvels at the tininess of his new world. This, _this_ is their private pleasure planet, and his hobbies here are much more intense, less listless. Meals come from Kylo during the day, nuts and dried meats from an unknown source, the fruit, so much of it, and when dusk falls, Kylo partakes of them both. First one, then eventually the other as Rey slowly regains consciousness, boxing them in on the makeshift nest made out of bunk pads in the hold, pinning them for smothering kisses, wet, wide licks of his tongue across their cheeks like a proud loth cat. Hux cries, some nights, and Kylo laps those up, too. Hux finds that he is insatiable for it.

He gets used to the weight of Kylo’s arm across him at night, and even sleeping next to Rey in their blankets. She still looks so painfully young, when she sleeps, hardly her twenty years, and at night he greedily watches her face in the dark, waiting for her to wake up like some kind of degenerate old man. Maybe her and Kylo will fight again when she does; Hux knows Ren knows this, and fears it.

Hux has no fear. He wants, very much, to talk to her.

 

_Why you, bright-thing, wild-one?_

_What does he see?_

One night, Hux stuffed-full on fruit, tangled in the nest much more comfortably than they ever were in the tent, Kylo says to the ceiling vents:

“Snoke is dead.”

Rey’s quiet breathing whistles between them.

Snoke. Funny name. It makes Hux a sluggish moment to remember who Snoke was, why he should care; an artifact of his life when it hadn’t coalesced into this sharp, intense pinnacle of their private space, some vague comet-tail spindling behind him, free of Kylo and Rey. He worshipped Snoke once, he thinks—no, that’s not quite right. He followed him and fought him in equal turns. He was his General.

“If I—“

“She killed him. Seven months ago.”

Hux is impressed, first, with her. This comatose, kitten-weak thing laid down at his right hip, could hardly lift a finger if she tried, can hardly speak, killed his superior. Somehow, her warmth feels more holy, more fascinating. His ache to speak to her deepens.

Beneath this, he is impressed that Kylo can keep track of time so neatly. Six months ago. How long had they been here, or even at the camp? A year? Two? Then again—the world seems to be slipping through his fingers on these long, flushed days that carry and stretch to the horizon, past it. These short, hot days that pass by in the space of a heartbeat, an eye-blink.

“Her?’ he asks.

“Yes,” Kylo whispers. Hux can see him tucking his lips between his teeth in the silhouette cast by the ship’s gently pulsing static functions. There is a wetness to his voice. Then he rolls over, is silent.

 

Rey rises the next morning. Or something akin to it, at least; Hux awakes to her pawing gently at his cheek, fingers lax and sloppy, as if her hands don’t belong to her own wrists. Her face is flushed and her slitted eyes glazed over, looking up at Hux through sleep-clotted lashes. Her tongue is nearly lolling from her mouth, unfocused in body and mind, and he knows that something is wrong with her. He wonders if he should call Kylo, who’d risen hours before to perform his savage hunter-gatherer activities, presumably. Rey hiccups something that sounds like _fur_ and keeps messing with his stubbled beard until Hux kisses her out of curiosity and she goes silent. Her lips are warm and too pliant beneath his; he finds the feeling too unnerving to steal more than a few careful mouthfuls. He doesn’t understand how Kylo can enjoy this.

Rey’s sickness evolves with her wakefulness, and by the time Kylo returns, the morning light outside has heightening to afternoon, and Rey is in full-force, moaning and rutting at the hand Hux got crooked between her legs. It’s a simple favor, helping her, his answer to the begging of her fraught body language, but Kylo pulls him away rough enough to make his shoulder joint suck at its socket.

Hux falls. His fingers leave her wet slickness on the cool, dusty ground where they’re spread wide to catch him, bruises narrowly avoided. He watches the two of them meet each other, old man, voyeur, from the floor.

Hux realizes that he’s never seen Kylo with a woman, encompass that softness, before, not really, when Rey looks too small in his hamfisted, overbig hands. But she doesn’t seem to mind; “ _Mmph_ ,” she grunts into the soft cradle of his mouth, slipping a hand beneath her rough pants to replace Hux between her legs and rub at herself again as they kiss with abandon. She bites him, and Kylo looks blissful enough to split from his skin. There is no language for this, no means of reconcile.

That day they consume nothing but each other, fucking brutally enough in the blankets that Hux wonders how they look when they fight, touching himself from his space at their side, fantasizing about the encounter that left Kylo’s face homely and scarred, or the one that took his fingers.

When they curl together in the evening, cumstained and starving, there are bites all up and down and crissed-across Kylo’s shoulders and Hux thinks he finds it, there. That thing Kylo stole from the far, sandy reaches of the universe, jealously guarded between them.

 

At some point, on some morning, Kylo lets him fuck her.

“Oh,” he gasps for every white-hot point of pleasure shared between them, bright and cold like the unclouded stars over their little home at night. He can feel the prickle of the rough blanket beneath the nape of his neck, slick with sweat. His thighs are trembling with effort. Her eyes are blown dark in the shared, hot space between them. She’s beautiful. Hux thinks this is the closest to another human being he has ever been.

“Oh,” he gulps, again, then again.

“ _Oh_ —“

 

At some point, on some afternoon, Hux finds out about the fruit. He minds less than he thought he would. He keeps eating. Rey gluts herself and cries out for sex, and they share it on their bed, all three of them, silty light from the door coloring their skin the warmlush color of gold.

 

One day, they fight. Hux wakes up like a gunshot in the warmth of their bed because Kylo’s yelling and Rey’s up and their tiny world is ending, one screamed threat and shattered array at a time. He untangles himself from the bedding. Rey lucid is quick-mean and sharp as anything Hux has ever seen, entirely feral with hackles raised and eyeteeth out, ready to feast, fuck, flee. Kylo is going at her and it looks like a _fight_ all quickness and Force-frenzy—this was the thing Hux so needed, so craved—and Hux isn’t sure if Kylo is winning.

“Hux—get her—“

Hux doesn’t move, and for moment he sees it: a man clutching, in terror, at the two things in the universe that mean anything to him, that have ever fucking _mattered_. So he rises.

They have her once she’s calmed, sated on fruit, the trifecta of things restored with only one casualty suffered, a quick rabbit-punch to Kylo’s nose that’s left him with blood coursing lustily down his chin as he pushes into her. Hux slides in along side him, and they take, together. Kylo looks so ferocious above the plane of Rey’s shoulder, magnificent as he was when they first crossed, like stars or swords, all those lifetimes ago, and Hux will surely remember this.

 

 

 

 

One morning, Hux does not remember his name. Kylo calls him Tash, now, the remnant of some secret life long-told and quick forgotten, and Rey _Love_ , for his shy sweetness. Their world is a perfect one, so whole and so good, and he realizes, quite simply, that these names suffice.

He rises, as usual, before them both and nips out into the jungle, barefoot on the moss and matted leaves, hair braided by Kylo’s thick fingers and swinging against his nape. He feels lighter-footed than usual. Their shady grove is easy to find and hefts the fruits in his palm; they eat so many different kinds, now, a lush bounty that he pools in the makeshift pocket of his held-wide shirt, taking in abundance for when they’ll wake together, feed each other, live. The air is fresh, warm and sweetly perfumed with the earth and the morning, and he turns his face to the sun.

 

The claustrophobic tent, the light of his soldiers beating down on him from above, forever; there is none of this. No duties, no mantle, no paperwork doubled up on his desk to pave his bureaucratic conquest of the universe. No melancholy, even, save one thing. One old ache, one that he has carried in him for a long, long while. Since he was a child, perhaps, and responsible for nothing.

He wishes for a waltz.

 

The sky is wide in the valley. Hux closes his eyes, and he hums.


End file.
